Gopikrishna Vasista Tatapudi and Mohammed Ahmed Turki AlSudairi
responsiveness and fulfillment are the major objectives of nation’ s e‐government service quality( OECD‐DSG 2007). The implementation strategy should consider the support and simplification of government interaction with all parties i. e. government, citizens and businesses, where government interaction stands for the delivery of government products and services, exchange of information, communication, transaction and systems integration( Backus 2001).
Objective of this paper is to highlight and establish the significance of e‐governance service quality and new service design and development towards achieving the service fulfillment. Because the public value lies in service fulfillment and can be achieved by adopting the abstraction‐standardization‐concretization methodology( AlSudairi and Vasista 2013) for implementing self‐services and user‐driven innovation among the interacting parties. It attempts to highlight the aspects of service quality and simplification of the customer relationships with public administration( Torres et. al. 2005) through e‐governance efforts.
2. Towards building theoretical framework for e‐governance
E‐Governance is relatively a new research area. Vasista( 2012), made two considerations while establishing a quality management system for effective public administration. They are:( i) clearly understand how e‐ governance can be distinguished from e‐government and( ii) build a framework that describes challenges and measures in the quality management system. The framework is attempted to build a benchmarking policy and measurement variables for establishing quality management system in public administration based on theoretical ground work from the level of basic definitions mentioned by Loffler( 2001). Further the challenges and key functional measures in quality management system of effective public administration are summarized. In cinch, it concludes that while e‐government focuses on G2C, considering service provider perspectives of measures, e‐governance focuses on G4C by considering the service requester perspectives and adopting citizen‐centric approach along with user‐centered design for evaluation purposes. E‐Service is an increasingly adopted channel for having interactions among stakeholders. E‐Government requires advancing from early life‐cycle phases of mere information publication towards other phases of e‐services development up to the transformation( Luppicini 2005, p. 106) phase of Gartner’ s e‐government maturity model. In addition to efficiency goals, the empowerment of citizens and their satisfaction through service fulfillment is an important consideration to be focused as a part of contemporary goal of public management. Thus customer orientation and citizen‐centricity are required to be considered while providing quality e‐services to the public( Karlsson et. al. 2012). Authors argue that once the customer‐centricity is considered in public administration, it should no more be called as e‐government and the term e‐governance takes this new portfolio( Vasista, 2012).
In order to achieve public service conformance with customers Request For Proposal( RFP) for service fulfillment and its evaluation, we have made two considerations( i) provide a rationale in terms of pointing to an established service quality theory and its corresponding model;( ii) focus on implementation strategies related to new service design and development that influence the public value, which can be found in effective service fulfillment and integrated public service delivery( Millard, 2006). The following sections deal with these two considerations.
3. E‐governance service quality considerations
Public sector services are responsible and accountable to citizens and communities as well as to its customers. Several researchers( Wisniewski and Donnelly 1996; Rowley 1998; Wisniewski 2001; Brysland and Curry 2001) have dealt with service quality in public services earlier. Further studies conducted on service quality in public service include: Ramseook‐Munhurrun, Lukea‐Bhiwajee and Naidoo( 2010) on front line employee and customer perspective; Hsiao and Lin( 2008) on customer oriented public service enhancement system; Naz( 2009) on E‐Governance for Improved Public Service Delivery in Fiji; Bhattacharya, Gulli and Gupta 2012 on service quality for e‐government portal from the design and implementation perspective.
According to Reynoso and Moores( 1995), issues such as effect of service quality to an organisation from management perspective are equally important as to service quality from customer’ s perspective( Zailani, Din and Wahid 2006).
Naz( 2009) conducted research by proposing hypotheses to assess whether e‐governance is positively related to the outcomes of effectiveness, efficiency and equity in services. The research concludes that benefits of public service delivery through e‐governance can be much above the citizen expectations in achieving
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